This exhibition focuses on a new body of work by Lowell Boyers, in conversation with a selection of works by Françoise Gilot, Suzanne Duchamp, Raoul Dufy, Marsden Hartley and others. The theme, broadly, is the flower, as we look back to the summer and ahead to the winter. But as we explore these new works by Boyers, we think not so much of static flowers, but rather, of our dynamic selves, as in James Wright’s poem, “Blessing,”That if I stepped out of my body I would break / Into blossom.

Tom Healy, writer and former Chairman of the Fulbright Board and President of the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, has written that “Boyers' paintings radiate outward. It's as if we were witness to the moments following internal combustions, as if Boyers had just broken a barrier between us and some inner world. The surfaces are so liquid that color stains that world, saturates it with brilliance, but never seems to fix it into a rigid image. There is no ground, no sky, no horizon in these paintings. We look through cloud color, breath, vapor toward the glow of some inner space.”

In "The Metier of Blossoming," poet Denise Levertov celebrates the growth of a flower and asks:If humans could be / that intensely whole, undistracted, unhurried, / swift from sheer / unswerving impetus! If we could blossom / out of ourselves, giving / nothing imperfect, withholding nothing!

This new body of work by Lowell Boyers provides an answer. These are ecstatic paintings which take as their point of departure some element or elements of the flower, but which explore dualities, both exploding outwards and pulling us inwards, as though, at once, with a radiating generosity and a cosmic gravity. Mostly figured against black backgrounds, these works evoke both the darkness as well as the infinite light of the night sky. Vibrating with intense, saturated colors, the canvases seem to overflow their boundaries, as though we may be witnessing not merely the blossoming of a flower, but the spectacular dying of a star. These are works which are frank in their tactile and sensuous beauty, which indeed blossom...withholding nothing.